Writing For Readers — 5 writing styles for maximum impact

(Reading time: 6 – 9 minutes)

Shout out to Mish’s readers! This is an older article, but still good. Thanks for stopping by.

Millions of blogs now inhabit the internet. It seems like there are a million different writing styles as well, with the writing ranging from amazingly awesome to painfully poor. As it turns out, a small number of article styles predominate on the blogs with the best writing and most popular content:

• Snackable: Seth Godin, Behavior Gap, Calculated Risk
• List: Mashable, Smashing Magazine
• Journalism: Global Economic Analysis
• Polemic (also known as “rant”): Karl Denninger
• Shaggy dog story: textism.com

Let’s examine each style in turn.

Snackable style

“Snackable” content is short material, blog posts which are 200-300 words in length. These small posts are great for asking questions of the reader, for helping readers see a different perspective on an old problem, posing a new problem, and in general for asking the reader to think rather than take extensive, immediate action. Here’s an example of snackable content, explaining bit literate labeling for LaTeX documents.

List-based style

List-based posts have become very popular with blog writer for two reasons: lists are popular with readers, and are popular with search engines.

But don’t write a list-based post attempting to increase your search engine rankings! Search engines continually adjust their ratings algorithms, and today’s hot list-based content may get stale as more and more people confuse the form for the content: it’s not the list that matters, it’s how the reader benefits from the list!

This post is an excellent example of a list-based article. Everyone lays out their lists a little differently, but I like to provide each item as a sort of mini “table of contents” right at the start of the article to help the reader determine very quickly whether the article meets his or her needs.

Some excellent list-based articles can be found on Smashing Magazine and on Mashable.

Journalism style

Some of the best blogs anywhere post regular articles of 1500-2500 words in length that treat a narrow topic with much more depth than one usually finds in mainstream publications.

These article require deep knowledge of the subject material, and are typically written by experts in the subject matter. One of my favorites is Global Economic Analysis, written by Michael Shedlock. Mr. Shedlock is an excellent financial analyst, and always lays his material very effectively.

Polemics — rants with a point

Polemic is a fancy word that means “rant,” but for maximum effectiveness. That is, a polemic is a rant with a point. It’s not just to blow off steam, although it can do that as well. A well-crafted polemic should inspire, stir up, raise the rabble, get people moving, create motion in some way inducing the reader to take action.

Anytime you are in the mood for a good rant, go ahead and write it. But don’t publish it right away! Save it your draft article queue. When you have cooled down, take a rational look at it to make sure there is some actual benefit to the reader. Then publish!

Shaggy dog stories

Shaggy Dog Stories are typically written for entertainment, but can be used for instruction. Like a very long-winded koan.

Beware, shaggy dog stories are hard to write well. You have to keep your end goal clearly in mind, and your writing along the way must be mesmerizing. If you have the ability to write such stories, it’s worth practicing.

If you find yourself wandering around in an article that has become difficult to write, and where the end of the article bears little relationship to your promise to the reader at the beginning of the article, you may have accidentally written a shaggy dog story.

If you find one of these mutts lurking around your website, consider any of the following:

• Rewrite the article throwing away all away everything not related to your main point.
• Split the article into two or more pieces, where each piece can be it’s own article.
• Just throw it away. If it’s not very good, it’s not going to benefit your readers.

At the very minimum, edit the article to put it back into “Private” or “Draft” state so that you can work on it privately before letting it back out of the kennel.

On the other hand, if you think you might really have something, think very hard about how you’re leading the reader down one path, then stunning them at the conclusion when they find themselves somewhere completely different.

The best example of a shaggy dog story I can think of is The Usual Suspects. Verbal Kint leads agent Culan far, far down the “primrose path,” and when Culan cops to the story, it’s way too late. If you haven’t see The Usual Suspects, go get it now.

When your story makes the reader scream What. Just. HAPPENED!? you know you succeeded.

Length matters (except when it doesn’t)

Yes and no…

The absolute length of the article, either long or short, is not as important as delivering what the reader expects to read.

For example, Seth Godin nearly always delivers very short articles on a daily basis. If he changed to writing very long articles on a weekly basis, his readership would change. Whether his readership would increase or decrease depends on what he wrote, but it would change his readership. Michael Shedlock almost always delivers a lengthy (more than 1000 word) article every day on some aspect of the current economic climate.

What you just read…

Look back over this article, which is list based. I’ve structured the article such that each type of article first appears in a list, then each item in that list gets it’s own explanation. There are other ways to structure list-based articles, but this works well for me as a writer. How does it work for you as a reader?

Another technique I used in this article was “Writing to be Scanned.” Scannable content allows the reader to use your section headers and other formatting devices to quickly get the gist of the article without having to read it detail. One way to create scannable content is to first create an outline such that the outline could stand alone as a 1-paragraph article (snackable!).

What’s your favorite style? Did you come here from a WIAW Week in Review? Leave a note!

Update July 25, 2010. I wrote this article nearly 18 months ago, when I first started “serious blogging.” It’s still good. Back then I didn’t know about link baiting or Google Alerts, but I was reading the blogs I mentioned daily. I recommend you read them as well. Mish and Denninger saved me a LOT of money, I got out 100% of the market at peak, in October 2007, as a result of reading their blogs.

As it turns out, Mr. Shedlock was kind enough to feature this article on July 24, 2010: Five Writing Styles For Blogs. I realize reciprocal linking is a big no-no for SEO, but I don’t care. If you aren’t reading Mish, you should be.

Tagged as: Blogging success